Dish's latest retransmission dispute with Turner Broadcasting may never be resolved, insists Dish boss Charlie Ergen. Customers lost access to Turner channels including CNN several weeks ago, and as with other retrans fights, both sides have been busy using websites to try and direct consumer ire toward the other guy (See Turner's SaveMyShows.com website and Dish's DishStandsForYou.com website).

To hear Ergen tell it, CNN isn't the darling it once was, and its absence isn't going to be missed, even on election night:

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When we take something down we’re prepared to leave it down forever. Things like CNN are not quite the product that they used to be. You can imagine: CNN down on election night would have been a disaster 15 or 20 years ago. Now there are plenty of other places for people to get news. In fact a lot of people get news not from TV but from their devices.

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Ergen also says that without those channels, the company won't have to raise prices next year:

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If we’re not going to be in a relationship with Turner then we would not have to raise our prices next year. And that would be slightly cash positive for us from a cash flow perspective. Yes, we listen to customers. But we would save a big, big, big check from a cash flow perspective. And for those folks who don’t care about news and cartoons, we have other news and cartoon shows.

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Which sounds great for Dish, but so far customers haven't seen refunds after paying the same amount of money for less content. And Ergen's bluffing to some degree -- the company clearly can't tell all of its broadcasting partners to go to hell. Dish's primary business is TV, and unlike some of the smaller cable operators leaving the TV business, they don't have broadband revenues to fall back on.